Fishers of Men
by SouthSideStory
Summary: Long before his Games begin, twelve-year-old Finnick Hanigan has trouble following the rules. He learns the hard way that the road from home to the arena is not an easy one.


There are only two rules, Dad tells me. First: never sell to Peacekeepers. The right man in white will pay more for our trinkets than anybody else in the district. But the wrong one will march you to the Justice Building for poaching Capitol property.

"We made this stuff. How could it belong to the Capitol?"

"That's their water and so's everything in it," he says. "Be it fish or seashells or sand dollars."

That's stupid. Nobody could own the ocean. Dad doesn't like mouthing, though, so I keep my opinion to myself.

Second: be honest.

Dad kneels in front of me. Sunburn shows beneath his freckles, pink patches peeking through mottled brown. "Sea glass isn't sapphires. Don't say what you're selling is something it's not." He grips my shoulders, and the firmness of his hands makes me feel caught. Calm but caged, and I think of how my father can always turn _Bonnie _back on course by pulling the right lines. "You understand?"

I say, "Yes," even though I don't.

"Now go on." Dad slaps me on the back, the same way you'd smack a pack animal. Just a little too hard, to get it moving. "Be back by supper time."

I grab the burlap sack of wares and turn for the beach. Sand arcs out from my feet as I run, sinks and pulls on my every step, like the ground is falling away and will take me with it. No boats line the horizon, and the Sunday sea is stripped to bare empty blue.

The holiday houses are stilted, whitewashed buildings north of town, even bigger and fancier than those in the Victor's Village. Armored Peacekeepers patrol nearby, stretching and yawning. One officer swings his baton at a low flying gull. For lazy practice or plain meanness, I don't know. He misses and the bird sails away.

It's early, barely past sun-up, but there are already Capitol tourists wandering from their summer homes to the oceanfront. Mothers carrying babies and beach bags. Oiled up girls in tiny swimsuits. I see cotton candy hair and skin dyed pink, green, orange. The women are all stick limbs and full chests and flashy colors, like birds.

There's a man lying on a turquoise towel who's some kind of blue all over. "Would you like to buy a souvenir, sir?" He slides sunglasses down a nose so straight it can't be real. To get a better look at the wares, I think, but he only looks at me. "What's for sale?" he asks.

Sand dollars, red coral, rope bracelets. Conch shells and mother-of-pearl necklaces. All the ocean's orphans, polished or painted up pretty; my sister told me that line always charms customers.

"Anything else?" The blue man taps a line down my breastbone.

"No," I say, and run before the weight behind that touch can turn to pain. Even after I've put half the beach between us, I still feel the burden of that finger on my chest. Heavy and unwanted. I wish I could go into the water. Just stand in the high tide and let the waves wash me clean.

But I have a job to do, so I try my luck with a group of teenage girls. The youngest is maybe twelve, like me, thirteen at most. Barely reaping age. Her skin's the lightest shade of yellow, and it reminds me of the baby Trell Hargrove's daughter birthed in the spring. A little boy that cried at all hours, so loud we could hear him four houses away. "Born too early," Mama told me, in that flat, final tone she uses to announce the last of a thing, whether it's grain or daylight or minutes until the Games begin. A week later the Hargrove baby died. Finally quiet, and I'm ashamed that I was thankful for that.

The girl holds up a hemp armband threaded with driftwood beads. Just last night I sat by the fire with Nessa and finished that piece. Now I wish she'd take her sunflower fingers off it. "How much is this one worth?" she asks.

"Twenty denarii." That's not quite true, but I spent hours knotting the tiny ropes into something beautiful. Selling the bracelet for anything less seems wrong.

"Don't pay it," says an older girl. Uncolored, untattooed, and flat as a board, she's plain but proud with it. Mama says that's the only thing an ugly girl can be besides pitiful. "These district peddlers will rob you blind if you let them."

"Stop bossing me, Patricia. It's my money." Cheeks blushing orange, she digs through her purse for the paper notes. "Mom said I could spend it how I like."

"Whatever. Blow your allowance on some crummy souvenir if that's what you want." Patricia slathers more oil on her arms and legs. It smells like the coconut cream cakes my family can never afford. With her white skin and strawberry hair I know she's gonna burn within the hour. If I were kind as my mother or fair as my father, I might warn Patricia and halve my asking price for that bracelet. Instead, I keep my silence and swindle the yellow girl out of her denarii.

As I move on to the next customer, I tell myself that I haven't broken the second rule. Not really. And it isn't like my father will ever know.

* * *

I bring home an empty bag and a thick fold of colorful money. At dinner Dad counts my earnings and says I'm the best businessman in the family. The praise sounds stiff, and I'm not sure if he means it in a good way or not. But then he smiles, and I try to think of anything besides the bills stuffed into my pants pocket. All the cash I can't explain, hidden away before I entered the house.

"Maybe the prettiest." Rordan picks at a piece of tessara bread. "We know the Capitol loves that."

"You're just jealous," I say, and while he's busy glaring I swipe the last shrimp from his plate. Rordan lunges across the table, but I spring out of reach. "Slow too," I say, and pop it into my mouth.

"Finnick!" Dad shouts.

My stomach turns, and I wish I'd just kept still and quiet. He doesn't like it when we roughhouse, or make too much noise. And if Dad doesn't like something, we won't either.

He comes around the table, moving with the hard, purposeful stride I only ever see when I'm in trouble. I want to run, but that will only make it worse when he catches me. So I stand still, waiting. Then Dad fists a hank of my hair and pulls me from one side of our little kitchen to the other. It hurts, stings at my scalp and underneath, but I'm not tenderheaded anymore, so I don't cry and I don't beg.

(He only ever grabs me and Mama like this-by our hair that's not-quite-auburn, not-quite-blonde, and maybe that's why. Because it's the same.)

"We don't take from each other in this house," Dad says, voice loud enough that our neighbors can probably hear him, and he shakes me. Still gripping my hair, and I can't help it, I feel the tears sliding down my face. I wish he'd drag me to another room, where Mama and Nessa and Rordan wouldn't see, but he doesn't. Dad just shakes me again right here and makes me cry in front of them. "Especially not food. You know better than that. Didn't I teach you better than that?"

"Yes, sir," I say, "Yes, sir," and I hate how quick the words come. How easy I say whatever he wants to hear.

Sometimes that's enough, and today it is. He lets go of my hair and tells me to sit down and finish supper.

My scalp burns something awful, and my eyes feel tender and swollen. I take my seat across from Rordan and tear my tessara bread into smaller pieces. It tastes like seaweed and sand, and I'd rather eat shoe leather than one more bite, but if I don't I'll pay for it. I choke down the last of my dinner and try to pretend it's cake. Sometimes I can trick myself into believing things that aren't real, but right now there's too much truth stinging under my skin for that to work.

Dad gives Rordan the last of his own dinner, and when my brother smiles it makes me want to punch his freckled face. Because there's one thing he has that I don't: Dad's approval. It's only because they're so alike. Solid, hardworking, hot-tempered. And Rordan is the spit of our father—red-haired and brown-eyed, with broad hands and blunt features, shorter than me but already brawny.

When we're done, Mama gathers our plates for washing. The dirty dishes stack together with force, and when she stops at my father's place she says, "It was a _shrimp_. We're hard up for a lot of things in this district, but so far that's not one of 'em."

She spoke too soon, though, because by morning the town square has been papered with white flyers announcing this quarter's quotas, and Capitol appetites doubled overnight.

* * *

Bakers' daughters don't live off the water, so I skip afternoon chores to teach Pearl Nelson to swim. In part for Pearl, but mostly because I don't want to go home yet.

"I must be the only girl in the district who's never learned," she says.

Ocean swallows us up to our ankles, knees, waists. Pearl grabs my arm, eyes wide and blue as the world around us. "I'm not allowed to go any further than this."

"That's fine, we can stay right here," I tell her, because the waves will meet us halfway. Hungry tide rises up our ribs, laps at my chest and Pearl's white throat. Underwater, no one can see our fingers tangled together. Then it doesn't matter if she's from town and I'm not. Her lips taste like sea spray and fresh bread, my home and hers.

"I really like you, Finnick." Pearl flings the words away from me. Quiet and quick and toward the horizon, the way you'd toss a bottled secret. "Sorry. But I had to say something before tomorrow." Pearl is safe and eleven until the end of August, but my twelfth birthday was last winter and the reaping is only a few hours away.

"It's okay," I say. "I like you back."

When I get home, Dad sets me to washing the dinner dishes and promises a hiding if I skip chores again. I scrub the plates, cleaning away the remnants of a supper I didn't see. My stomach growls, and Rordan shakes his head at me. "Why can't you just do what you're told?" he asks.

I shrug, because I'm not sure how to answer. All I know is that I can't follow Dad's rules and still breathe. That's something my brother can't understand. He wouldn't tell lies to stupid Capitol tourists or ditch chores to kiss a pretty merchant girl. And he would never hide money from our parents, like I do. Brightly colored bills stuffed in my mattress, a little fortune folded up among the rags.

* * *

My brother and sister stand with Dad, and they look like a family all their own. Copper-haired, stocky, sun-pinkened and dotted with freckles. Not like Mama and me. Today, with my name on a handful of paper slips in the reaping ball, it hurts that Dad hugs Nessa and ruffles Rordan's wiry red hair, but only gives me a hard look. A silent warning not to cause trouble.

Even Mama didn't bother to mend my clothes the way she always does for my brother and sister. I'm facing my first reaping in Rordan's worn out things: pants that show my ankles, too-big shoes, and a shirt missing its top two buttons.

"If I have to go to the Capitol in this, they'll laugh at me."

"If you go to the Capitol that'll be the least of your worries," Rordan says. He finishes buttoning his shirt, all the way to the top, right up to his thick neck.

Mama fusses with my collar, turning it down and smoothing the fabric. "Don't you worry about that. You're not going anywhere."

Dad turns, and he catches Mama by the arm. "Are you stupid? You don't tell your children they're safe. Not today."

Mama looks at the floor, quiet and patient. Waiting for what comes next, but Dad lets her go and says, "Get some breakfast on the table."

I sit on the floor of the main room with my brother and sister while Mama cooks.

"Will you braid my hair?" Nessa asks. "You do it better than me."

Rordan snorts, but I ignore him and sit behind Nessa. She has pretty hair, bright and thick, if coarser than mine. This morning I weave it into a fishbone, and something about the repetitive movement calms me down. My name will only be in the ball a few times. The whole south-district is full of children older and poorer and from bigger families than me. Besides, volunteers step in for Four boys more often than not.

I tie off the end of Nessa's plait with the worn, white ribbon she gives me.

"Thank you," she says, and presses a quick kiss to my cheek.

Mama calls everyone to the table, and we eat well-better than we should. Scrambled eggs and five fat sausages which must have come from the butcher. Fresh bakery biscuits, hot and butter golden, that remind me of Pearl. No tessera bread touches the table today. Mama serves Dad first, then Rordan and me, Nessa, and finally herself. I hate that she always gets the leavings, whatever no one else picked. The smallest sausage and brownest biscuit. The last of the eggs, scraped from the bottom of the big, black iron skillet she cooks with.

But that doesn't stop me from eating my breakfast. Forkful after forkful of fluffy, yellow eggs, speckled with salt and black pepper. Every bite of the hot, seasoned sausage and soft biscuit. And I take my time, chewing slowly and savoring the tastes. Because for all I know, this could be my last meal at home.

After breakfast, Mama takes me aside and whispers, too low for Dad to hear, "You know I'd never let anyone take you away from me, don't you, Finnick?"

There's not a thing she can do if my name comes out of the reaping ball, but I kiss her cheek and say, "Yes, Mama."

* * *

These are the numbers I know: six, eighteen, forty-two. My tessarae, Rordan's, and Nessa's.

We have a new Capitol escort this year. Some young woman fresh from an outer-district victory whose name I don't catch. Ladies first! Snowy hands draw death from a glass globe. _Not Nessa, not Nessa, not Nessa._

Marlin Macorlis is pale and hollow-faced and the odds weren't in her favor today. No one volunteers. The boy is luckier. A stocky tribute trainee steps forward to take his place and District Four shouts his name: Jano Balteras.

Parents rush into the square as soon as the cameras clear out. Mama finds me first, pulls me to her breast and whispers "safe, safe, safe" into my hair. Her dress is so worn it's butter soft, and she holds onto me like I'll disappear if she lets go. Nothing in the world feels better than this, not swimming or out-racing Rordan or even making Dad proud. Mama says something, but she's crying too hard for me to understand. Then she pulls back and knuckles away her tears. It's the same thing I do when I'm upset, and it makes me want to hug her again. For Mama this time instead of me. She smiles, weak and watery, says we ought to find Nessa and Rordan.

My sister is celebrating with the other Eighteens. Yanira Vargas smacks a kiss to her cheek, then mine. Glen Oneal picks Nessa up and spins her around. Her white reaping skirt flies away from her legs, and she laughs. Glen kisses her too, but not on the cheek; Dad won't like that if he sees.

"They're free. No more tessarae, no more reaping. Not ever."

Niall Daley, victor of the Fifty-ninth Hunger Games, is talking to me. He seemed taller on television. Next to half-starved kids from the outlying districts, our volunteers always do. But he was strong enough to spear Twelve's girl from twenty feet away, then slit her district partner's throat.

"What's your name?" he asks.

"Finnick."

"Got a last name, Finnick?" He looks at me the way my father sizes up the day's haul. Top to bottom, measuring the worth of what you've caught. I toe the white sand at my feet. Capitol cameramen always pour it across the town square before a reaping.

"Hanigan," I say.

Niall Daley killed six children in the Fifty-ninth Games. I cried when he won, because we hadn't had Parcel Day in five years and there was nothing I wanted more than to taste syrup again. Dad cuffed me in the ear for that. Crying's for babies, he said. Are you a baby, Finn?

Niall Daley killed six children in the Fifty-ninth Games, but when my father says, "Get the hell away from my son," he moves, quick. It isn't till the victor is gone that I feel how Dad's hand shakes on my arm.

"Just run if that boy tries to talk to you again. You understand?"

I say, "Yes, sir," and let him pull me back to our family. Somehow I wandered away from them without even noticing.

"What did he want?" Mama asks.

"Nothing," Dad says. And now his grip on me tightens, hard enough to hurt. "Nothing he's gonna get, anyway. Let's go home."

* * *

Marlin dies at the Cornucopia. A pretty blonde girl from District One opens her throat from ear to ear. Cameras close in on the red spilling from the wound, from her mouth. Claudius Templesmith calls it disappointing. Such a waste.

Here's another number I know: one hundred eighteen. The children my district has sacrificed to the Capitol as payment for our fathers' sins. A week later Jano makes one hundred nineteen. The people of Four mourn and drink and meet their quotas without complaint, even when it means the children still alive go hungry. In my house there are no fish, no fruit, no greens. We eat the bread we gambled our lives for.

Nothing about this is wasteful. Everything about this is wasteful.

* * *

_Bonnie_ is ugly but faithful. She's been Dad's boat since before I was born, and her age shows in the stained deck and hull overgrown with barnacles, the stink of cod guts and gull droppings.

"Rordan!" Dad calls, "Help me bring her in."

The wind's against us today, pushing our little sailboat west, but my brother and father are stubborn. Their hands—blunt, hawkfish dappled, stronger than my own—work the rigging. Together they tug _Bonnie_ around and turn her homeward.

"I can't get this undone," Nessa says. While Dad and Rordan fought the wind, my sister and I have been fixing _Bonnie's_ second best net. Women's work, my father calls it, because it's usually a job for fisherman's wives and daughters.

"Give it here," I say, and Nessa drops the knot into my open hands. Though Mama has set me to weaving necklaces of late, this is what I love. Heavy rope smelling of fish and brine. I pluck at the kinks, looking for a weak point. Nothing. So I pull at the most frayed pieces and gently loosen the coils. It's slow work, and before long my fingertips burn. Still, by the time _Bonnie_ nears shore I've untangled the net and reknotted its joints.

"How do you do that?" Nessa asks.

"Dunno." Maybe I have a knack for turning things to my liking, for twisting them in whatever way suits. Rordan says so often enough, and it's probably true. But I like to think my talent is something else: that I see how things ought to fit together.

We dock with the setting sun at our backs and too few fish in our nets. Peacekeepers police the wharf, checking names and collecting the catch. I can see school friends and their families on the beach, talking and laughing after a day's labor. And there's Pearl, who sometimes waits for me here after the bakery closes.

I should help my father, but I can't stand to watch those men in white scold him like a schoolboy. So I step up to the railing and crouch on the wooden bar, balanced for one steady moment, and then I dive. Water breaks beneath me, follows the curve of my body from pointed hands to feet. Salt stings my eyes, but I look into the blue. Smiling clams hide between rocks, and red seaweed reaches and wraps around everything. Under here there are no Peacekeepers and no quotas and no fathers with eyes full of disappointment. I swim with the waves, let them carry me forward. Closer to shore, closer to home. Gritty sea bottom meets my hands, and I use it to push to the rippling surface.

I wade to dry land and find a tall, white-uniformed man waiting for me there. Head Peacekeeper Dawson. All I can think of is rule number one.

"Well if it isn't Lily's boy. You wouldn't be trying to sneak away with Capitol goods, would you?" Dawson gives me a rough shake and says, "Take off your clothes. If you've got so much as an oyster under there you'll spend the night in the stocks."

Praying that nothing swam up my shirt, I strip, and keep my eyes on his shiny black boots. My fingers fumble with my undershorts, but I skin out of them too. There's not a stitch on me except for the gazes of Peacekeepers and neighbors. Somebody whistles. One of my classmates, maybe. Dawson makes a show of checking for smuggled wares we both know I don't have. Hold up your arms, he tells me. Turn in a circle. Jump.

He pops hard candies into his mouth. Sugar-coated things from the Capitol that cost more by the bag than my father makes in a month. Dawson lets me stand naked in the sand until every sweet is gone, then says, "Get dressed." I cover myself in a hurry, though it's too late to matter. Half of District Four has seen every inch of me. They look away quick enough now that the show's over, friends and Peacekeepers alike. Even Pearl, who's been slipping her hand into mine every day since the reaping.

Dawson catches me under the chin, tilts my face up and stares hard, like he's searching for something around my eyes. "You look just like your mother," he says, and lets me go.

* * *

Ribbons of hurt sting across my back and bottom and legs. Leather kisses, Nessa calls them. Even lying on my stomach, the pain's too sharp to sleep with, and I can hear Mama getting kissed too. She takes it quieter than I did. Mama always takes it quiet.

"Are you fucking him?" The belt snaps. Once, twice, again again again until I cover my ears against the hateful love in the corner. "Answer me, or I swear to-" Mama hisses something and the belt hisses back.

Night air tickles the ladder of welts down my spine, and I imagine climbing up my own skin and onto the roof and out of this house. I trace the line of split stitches along the side of my mattress. Rags spill through the tear, but between them I can feel the sharp-edged thinness of paper notes. Twenty, fifty, one hundred, two hundred, three. The denarii I've lied for and smiled for and hidden away.

The second rule is to be honest, but maybe this is what my father expects. Falsehoods and secrets, stowed out of sight. Maybe I'm giving him just what he wants from me.

"Tell me the truth." Crying, someone is crying, and I've never seen it never heard it but I know in my gut the sound of my father's grief. There's rustling and wet noises and the cries change. Dad is quiet and Mama is loud. After, he calls her an ugly thing. One of those nasty, few-letter words I've been told never to speak.

My mother is beautiful, and everyone says I take after her. Green eyes, honey hair, gold skin. We're the same. My mother is beautiful, but now I see the ugly thing my father named her in the dark.

Whore.

* * *

A naked sunbather pouts her oyster pink mouth and tells me what a lovely child I am. Why thank you ma'am, would you like to buy a necklace? Yes, she would. Ma'am pinches my cheek, and it hurts to keep smiling, but I do. She picks a rope of blue sea glass, bottle shards frosted by the waves.

"What kind of stones are these?"

No kind, just trash washed into treasure. I tell her, "Sapphires."

Capitol kisses fall softer than leather ones, and when I count out the wad of denarii pressed into my hand I find that they're worth forty apiece. Ma'am kissed me three times, so now I can afford a coconut cream cake from the bakery. Pearl's father frowns when I order it, but he takes my money quick enough. The icing is the sweetest thing I've ever tasted, so rich my stomach turns, but I eat every bite.

Dad said not to change a piece to sell it, and I think of those blue bottle gems. Smoothed out and made beautiful by the sea. Maybe I'm like that, but inside out and upside down. A good thing that's been broken and dirtied. Worn down until you can't tell what it used to be.

* * *

Mama sits curled in the corner, long legs tucked in and head ducked down. Naked, wilted, she seems smaller than Nessa and younger than me. Rags litter the floor around her. Torn sheets, worn shirts, stained towels. Rotten washcloths and holey socks.

Mattress innards.

There's a father fist in my face and rainbow bills under my nose. Crisp Capitol-printed paper that smells like ink and strangers' skins. President Snow's nightcrawler lips smile at me from pink ten denarii notes, green fifties, orange hundreds.

"What did you do! What did you do for this money!" He doesn't ask, he screams. He screams too loud for any answer to matter.

I run, but not far. He catches me by the throat and it feels like drowning on dry land. My mouth opens and closes but there's angry hands hooking around my neck and nothing gets out or in and I'm going to die like the fish in my net-I breathe and it burns but I breathe. He threw me back, let me live, let me go. I suck in air but it's too rich for my lungs, same as coconut cream on an empty gut.

"You ungrateful little shit. Sitting on this pile of cash while we starved and what'd you do for it, huh? What'd you sell?"

"Nothing. Just what you gave me." Every word stings, squeezes my throat with the ghost of five-fingered violence. "That's all, I swear, nothing else nothing else nothing ugly." But I'm a lovely child and I sold that too and he knows.

Dad kneels before me, just like he did the day I traded a driftwood bracelet for the yellow girl's allowance. Maybe I should be afraid, but I'm not. All the anger has gone out of him. "You don't know what ugly is, Finnick. Not yet. But you'll learn."

* * *

On the way to wherever we're going, Dad says we should tell jabberjay truths. The rules are simple enough: you make a statement and your partner guesses whether it's real or not. I'm good at games and better at lies, so I nearly always win against Nessa or Rordan.

Mama is the only one who can ever beat me.

"I get to go first," Dad tells me. "You've been playing rebel for a while."

I nod, because the words I want to speak are stuck or broken, stalled in my sore throat.

We walk past the docks, then the holiday houses, and still Dad doesn't say anything. Circles of Capitol teenagers dot the beach, roasting marshmallows and passing around bottles of green liquor. It looks like they're fishing in the fire, using marshmallows for bait.

Then Dad says, "Your mother fucked Tiberius Dawson to keep your name out of the reaping ball. Real or not real?"

No, she'd never. Mama loves my father, even when he hurts her. Maybe loves him more when he hurts her, but I don't want to think on that. I shake my head. Not real. Dad won't say whether I'm right or wrong, and for some reason I remember Nessa's white skirt. How it swirled around her freckled legs when Glen lifted her off the ground. Mama let the hem out the night before, just like she sewed new buttons on Rordan's best shirt. So why did I go to the reaping in my brother's too-short pants and cast off shoes?

_You know I'd never let anyone take you away from me, don't you, Finnick?_

We've left behind the Capitol kids with their driftwood fire and now it's dark. Starless sky, black water, grey sand beneath my bare feet. This deep in the night I can't see what's up ahead, but I don't need to. I know where I'm going. "You're taking me to the Victor's Village. Real or not real?"

He says, "Real."

* * *

The reaping is a game of its own. Numbers and names and odds. When I was little I counted everything. My sister's tessarae, our neighbors' babies, the children caged in a white sand square every July. Mrs. Quent, my teacher, said I had a talent for math and she'd move me up a year if my parents allowed it. Dad said no, of course, but that didn't stop me from adding up the Peacekeepers on patrol, or comparing each quarter's quotas to the last.

It's almost funny. I've measured my way through twelve years, and now a price is being put to me. My value haggled over, then handed out. Ninety-five thousand, two hundred-fifty: that's how many denarii I'm worth, and for the rest of my life this is the only number that matters.

When it's done, Mags Cohen asks my name. I say, "Finnick Hanigan," but Dad shakes his head.

"No, he's his mother's son. Let him go by her name. Odair."


End file.
